Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [8]
His words came back to haunt me when I learned several months later that Flores had stepped through the trip wire of a hunterâs trap while gathering plants in the forest near his home and had received a blast of shotgun pellets which shattered his tibia. His friends barely managed to carry him out in a hammock and get him to a hospital on time. On arrival he had lost so much blood the doctors said he had only a few hours to live. They saved his life with a transfusion, then they saved his leg by replacing the shattered bone with steel plates. Flores spent a week in the hospital, then insisted on returning home. His friends transported him back to his forest retreat. For a month he took antibiotics as prescribed by the doctors, then set about healing himself with plants. In the meantime, the police identified the man who set the trap in the forest, an impoverished colonist living in a nearby frontier town. Flores could have pressed charges and had him sent to prison. Instead, he simply asked for an apology and encouraged the man not to set up further traps.
It took an hour to reach the house Flores had built next to a stream of near-boiling water that flows from a geothermal source in the forest. I arrived in the late afternoon and found Flores standing in his garden. His high cheekbones and slanted eyes made him recognizable as an Amazonian Indian.
Flores had already told me a bit about his life. His grandparents were enslaved during the rubber boom in the early twentieth century and taken from the Pachitea Valley to work downriver. Flores was born in 1951 in a community of displaced Ashaninca people who were only then shaking off the shackles of forced labor. As a child, he attended primary school and learned to read, write, and speak Spanish. His father, a reputed shaman, died when he was ten. This prompted Flores to follow in his fatherâs footsteps. He devoted his youth to apprenticing himself to several Ashaninca maestros. He traveled all around traditional Ashaninca territory, then settled near the town of Pucallpa, where people gradually recognized his skills as a plant specialist and healer. He only recently returned to the Pachitea, the homeland of his grandparents, to set up a healing center in the forest.
Flores has spent most of his life going between worldsâforest and city, indigenous and mestizo, traditional and modern. He is both an indigenous person and a cultural hybrid. When he walks barefoot through the forest wearing a crown of feathers and a traditional Ashaninca cotton robe, he looks like an indigenous shaman. And when he wears a shirt, jeans, and boots, he moves with ease in the world of mestizos.
The day after my arrival, I interviewed Flores on the thatched-roofed platform by the river where he conducts healing sessions. He sat at a homemade desk wearing a colorful cotton headband with Ashaninca designs and a white shirt that made him look like a doctor.
I wanted to record his view on intelligence in plants and animals. I began by asking what he thought the difference was between humans and other species.
âBueno,â he said. âI can say the difference is that human beings have voices with which to speak, whereas animals have their knowledge but do not have the property of speaking, or the strength to speak in a way that humans can understand. The same is true for plants. So there